This volume grew out of interactions between overlapping groups of colleagues and paper presentations focusing largely on ethnographic, qualitative and policy-oriented approaches to studying higher education. The papers (chapters) were presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting; the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conferences; Higher Education Close Up 2; Discourse, Power, Resistance conference; and the Society for Research into Higher Education conference. Through these presentations we have begun to explore, together and individually, aspects of the impact of commodifi cation and marketization on higher education in a number of countries. This chapter aims to provide the structural context for the chapters and frame contributors’ work. It locates these chapters in the context of the political economy of globalization and the rise of neoliberal economic ideology, which shape the stories of higher education being told in different countries and under different types of educational systems. It also recognizes local differences that, to borrow loosely Appadurai’s (1996) notion of disjuncture, are the result of different penetrations of media, migration, cultural, economic, fi nance and other fl ows. Thus this chapter explores the specifi c confl icts and contradictions that universities face in different locations largely in the North but also with signifi cant contributions that indicate how these confl icts and possibilities are realized elsewhere.